Forum Discussion
Use Calibre E-book manager (free) to read your EPUB files
They already have the source code for the classic Edge epub reader, so it's not like they are starting from scratch. Publish it as a standalone app, or bundle it into the new Edge if that is easier.
Ibukun Momson wrote:They already have the source code for the classic Edge epub reader, so it's not like they are starting from scratch. Publish it as a standalone app, or bundle it into the new Edge if that is easier.
Yeah only if it was that easy
- Ibukun MomsonMar 02, 2020Iron Contributor
Are you actively working on the Edge code base? Or are you a part of the Edge dev team? You can put in a word for those of us interested in the legacy Edge epub reader. It may not be priority for the team as FedeDiLo mentioned earlier, but if they see there's interest, some developers could be assigned to the task, seeing as they have already done it on the legacy Edge. It definitely is not as difficult as building from scratch.
- HotCakeXMar 02, 2020MVPSpoiler
Ibukun Momson wrote:Are you actively working on the Edge code base? Or are you a part of the Edge dev team? You can put in a word for those of us interested in the legacy Edge epub reader. It may not be priority for the team as FedeDiLo mentioned earlier, but if they see there's interest, some developers could be assigned to the task, seeing as they have already done it on the legacy Edge. It definitely is not as difficult as building from scratch.
No I'm not, how about you?
there is an interest? then there is software for it.
there are contradicting comments here.
you said your problem is not features which other Epub readers have, problem is the lack of "elegance" in them.
then you said you want Edge to only open Epub files, nothing else. well that won't be elegant.
that will be how other E-book readers on the market are.
- jrc14Mar 04, 2020Copper Contributor
HotCakeX As I understand it, Microsoft's decision that Edge won't render EPUBs any more is related to the transition to the new (Chromium-based) rendering engine core. I suspect that the old Edge EPUB-reader depended, for some of its functionality, on some rather clever interactions with the old EdgeHTML/Chakra engine - and that it turned out to be too hard (=expensive) to re-implement once Edge was instead using the Chromium engine underneath.
So in asking Microsoft to publish and maintain the old Edge EPUB reader as a standalone app, you're actually asking them to maintain the EdgeHTML/Chakra engine. That's a big chunk of code, and it's not used in any other Microsoft product, and it's quite likely to get broken by future OS releases - i.e. keeping it working would be a significant maintenance effort.
(Disclaimer: I don't know any of the details of the internals of Edge, I am just relying on published articles, and on my own personal experience of building rendering code in EPUB-reading apps; I am the developer of the Freda app, mentioned in this thread).